


it is one way to live

by fuckener



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 07:13:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1053982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt would stay stuck in the wartime if nobody tried pulling him out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it is one way to live

**Author's Note:**

> late to the party

They rebuild the parts of Hong Kong that were lost.

It takes years stretching into years, and in all that time Newt stays even though he’s grown to hate it there. The air is thick with pollution, and solving that world crisis is more than a one man job. (Two, he means. But part of him will always be spiteful for stupid reasons.)

The Shatterdome is still standing as a landmark: a symbol of unity, of what the world can endure and enact together. His lab is included in that. (Theirs, he means.) The specimens inside, the printed work and scribble-filled notebooks have been moved into his new place, which even he has to admit is really something. People were pretty thankful to him after the world didn’t end - rightfully thankful, really. His Nobel Prize is the first thing you see when you walk in the door (joint with another somewhere around South England; he’s trying not to keep his tabs too close) and even though it’s been a few years, for a while his name was making every newspaper, every scientific journal, every post-Kaiju spot on TV, every conversation about the war. (And always alongside someone else’s, always together, always thanks to the esteemed efforts of Doctor Newton Geiszler and -) 

The rockstar life was probably better before the alien invasion, he’s guessing.

They still interview him for documentaries and articles. They use any comprehensible papers he wrote in every university around the world. He’s on a reputational par with the gods of science, and when you travel into Ohio now it says on the welcome sign, Birthplace of Doctor Newton Geiszler, war-time saviour, whose scientific contributions were instrumental in ending the Kaiju war. Lays it on thick, maybe, but - saviour, it says. He doesn’t disagree one bit with that word.

It’s strange to live in the aftermath of your own life, he thinks. Nothing will ever top what he did, nothing he did then will ever be practically useful again, presumably. Hopefully. It’s science for science’s sake now, digging into the neon blood of the beast he keeps in the second guest bedroom. He writes down what he finds even though it’s stopped mattering. He looks outside and Hong Kong is alive and well, and he thinks that there are people out there now, young kids who read his name in articles sometimes and see pictures of inconceivable monsters in history books, there are people out there who know how to live without war.

It unsettles him. He’s had his bare hands into that old dead Kaiju in the guest room so many times over the past years that the skin underneath the tips of his nails has stained blue.

-

Mako Mori is a real sensation. Newt, he’s more of a cult figure - he sees kids studying biological sciences, human and Kaiju, dressed up like little acne-ridden versions of himself. It was flattering, annoying and then just an eye-roll. Raleigh and Mako are superstars on a level nobody else in history has been. Newt came up with a solution (with help) and they executed it. Saviours, in different ways. Not that he’s jealous, not anymore, not really. He likes the constant view of their faces on screens and tabloids, spraypainted murals that make them look like gods. He likes the reminder in a world that’s done with grieving and started on forgetting that once the it was just a playground for evil monsters, and now it’s - back to basics. 

That’s the thing about basing your whole life around war. Peacetime is where you go to die.

-

He gets an e-mail from someone that says:

**YOU ARE BEING EXTREMELY FOOLISH. KINDLY REASSESS EVERYTHING YOU ARE CURRENTLY DOING WITH YOUR LIFE.**

Newt assesses. With all the money, he’s taken to living the life of leisure, consisting of studying dead aliens and playing a kickass air-guitar to old Queen songs. Every few months he gets an offer from Cambridge to lecture on Extraterrestrial Biological Sciences with a personal aside if he scrolls down that’s normally something scathing and insistent like this.

Into the trash it goes. Then, the impulse grabs him to actually respond this time, and he gives into it before he can unsend the message:

**have reassessed. find that being dead is preferable to being a professor at your hoity-toity little school there. kindly imagine me flipping you the bird.**

(He misses a lot of things about the war.)

-

Bad idea. 

A few days later, someone knocks his door. This should send up warning signals, since there really is only one kind of person who would blatantly ignore the Kaiju shaped doorbell that plays _Carry On Wayward Son_ when you ring it.

“Newton,” Hermann says curtly when he opens the door, and Newt’s immediate and only thought is, _fuck_.

“Hermann,” he greets, and a strange wash of dread comes over him, as well as something pleased, something _stupid_. Hermann looks exactly the same, like he could be standing on the other side of the lab rolling his eyes or stewing in silent anger at him instead of on his doorway; but he’s different in slight ways, tiny quirks in his expression Newt’s brain absorbs in one look. He peeks his head out the door. “Are you and your gang of ragtag upper-class Englishmen here to try persuading me into teaching at your little school?”

Hermann visibly bristles, and Newt is giddy with nostalgia. “Cambridge is not a _little_ \- I refuse to have us already devolving into an argument within the first minute of seeing each other.” He straightens, even the fingers around his cane lining up neater, and gives Newt a look from down his nose.

“What else would we do?” Newt asks. He’s unshaved, in old, old clothes, and his fingernails are Kaiju blue. His sleeve tattoos of them are visible in their glorious completion. Hermann, in comparison, in his long smart coat and dark scarf, looks like a man who had nothing to do with any of the wartime funny business Newt did, which is patently untrue. It’s unsurprising but still makes Newt feel jilted with betrayal, that part of him that’s perpetually teenaged and angry.

Hermann looks at him for a moment, quietly, then away. “This probably means nothing to _you_ , but inviting guests into your home when they’re freezing cold on your doorstep is generally considered the well-mannered thing to do.”

“Ouch. Cutting,” Newt remarks, then he steps back to let Hermann inside, and bows.

-

His house probably looks every bit how Hermann would have imagined, which must be why he’s making a face like something inside of it stinks.

“Has something died?” he asks, and Newt is prepared to roll his eyes and dish out an insult in return until he realises yes, something has, about six years ago, and he’s just used to the smell of it.

Hermann must realise after a moment. He stares, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and says, “You aren’t keeping one _here_ ,” which Newt doesn’t think sounds as crazy as he’s making it out to be, really. They’re his, aren’t they? The other ones are stored in his new lab, this impersonable empty feeling place he doesn’t really like going, but this one - this one is the baby that tried to kill him, and it’s _his_ , and he can do whatever the fuck he wants with it.

Newt fakes a smile, says, “You wanna see him?” and then there’s a brief, thick silence.

“You need to leave this place,” Hermann tells him, quietly, and Newt hates, _hates_ the look in his eyes, that pity he doesn’t need. Hates that soft tone. “It’s not good for you.”

“I don’t need you to drag your sorry ass from England just to come here and tell me what’s good for me.” They’re stood in the living room, close together in the centre despite the fact it’s huge and bordered in plush sofas that he never actually sits on, anyway. He briefly glances at the painting behind Hermann’s head - a Kaiju emerging from the sea, electric blue clashing against the red sky - and then quickly looks away again.

Hermann goes thin-lipped, nostrils flaring. “I didn’t want it to come to this.” And Newt just knows he didn’t, can picture him in some nice house by the Cam, being a bumbling professor by day and a boring Englishman by night, happy to stay cooped up by his books forever. It’s honestly astounding that he came here at all, even more than it is to imagine him at his desk, students filing into the room while he looks at the papers he wrote when they were studying here, reluctantly together, and worrying about Newt.

“You shouldn’t’ve come,” Newt says, and he thinks the guest room will probably _stink_ if it’s right next to the second one, but hell if he’s letting Hermann take his bed for the night. He shrugs one shoulder. “You’re wasting your time here.”

“So are you,” Hermann replies, but there’s less venom than weariness.

-

They’ve always functioned differently, so it should be no surprise that Hermann ended up back in England, in a space there untouched by any sort of destruction from the past few years, teaching snobby rich kids how to crunch numbers and be dull for a living, while Newt stayed in Hong Kong, by the biggest interspecies war-site on the planet, keeping his hands deep inside the carcass of a dead Kaiju in most of his spare time. He knows there’s something - a lot of things off about what he’s doing and sometimes, late at night, when he imagines blue bodies shooting across the black ceiling and the metallic sheen of Jaeger armor, he can even admit it.

He doesn’t like looking into it too far, or the way he sometimes remembers the strangest things - remembers living as them, fighting as them, killing as them. He never really got out of that Kaiju’s brain, he thinks, which shouldn’t be surprising since more often than not he’s still up to his knees in its guts. It’s sparse, odd thoughts. Nothing to freak out over.

In the second guest room, Hermann has his handkerchief covering his nose and stares down at the old dead alien in its (now closed) glass pod. Newt watches him and wonders if the same recognition is in his mind, wonders if he feels that startling uneasy surge of _self_ that comes to him when he looks at this thing.

“Of course you kept the one I hated most of all,” Hermann says, muffled by his handkerchief. He’s frowning. Newt feels that surge again and thinks of being a quiet little boy whose best friend was his calculator, cried when his father died and only ever kissed one person. (Two. Two people.)

It feels rude to think on another person’s memories, invade them from afar, but Newt remembers those last few months in the lab cleaning up shop, still staying in those shitty rooms across from each other. He remembers being looked at more intimately than he ever had before, being known to someone else almost as well as he was to himself. Hermann’s memories are just things that are there when he looks for them. (And sometimes, he does, and most of those times he looks for memories of himself pulled from another man’s head.)

“I knew him too well to just leave him,” Newt says, looking back to it, every familiar inch of this monster of his and Hermann looks at him, sharply. Too closely.

-

At night, Newt grudgingly sets out a makeshift bed on one of his sofas and bites down a smile at Hermann slipping his shoes off and neatly setting them beside it. He perches down onto the cushions, cautiously, then sits their, back still ramrod straight, staring at Newt’s completely for show fireplace.

“I leave on Wednesday,” Hermann states, and he pauses to briefly press his lips together before adding, “with or without you.”

Two days. Newt doesn’t know how he thinks that could be enough to change his mind. “Alright,” he says, and he leaves out the barb about him leaving disappointed because he’s tired, tonight. He’s tired and it’s fucking awkward enough right now because their stupid synched up brains are obviously remembering the same thing. He heads towards the door and waves a hand over his head. “Goodnight, Hermann.”

-

Having someone around is strange. Newt doesn’t wake up until noon, and already finds freshly made food to eat in the kitchen which is a first. When he’s done eating, he finds Hermann in the living room, book in lap and three more by his side. The pillows and blanket that made up his bed last night are organised on top of each other on the opposite end.

“Finally awake,” Hermann notes without looking up.

Newt yawns and drops on the seat across from him. He doesn’t sleep well, which is a normal long-term side-effect of mind melding.

There’s a soft, scratchy sound as Hermann turns a page. “What do you plan to do today?” 

“We should go to the lab,” Newt answers, easily.

This makes Hermann look at him over his book, eyes narrowed and mouth thin. “You’re unhealthy,” he diagnoses, Newt furrowing his brow at him in response, “and I will not indulge you.”

“It’s not ‘ _unhealthy_ ’.” Something defensive has risen up in him, hot, offended. He curls and uncurls his hand into a fist to avoid saying anything rash. “You come all this way and don’t want to see it? Not at all? It was a pretty huge part of our lives.”

Our. He shouldn’t have said that. Hermann’s probably docking sanity points off him right now for still talking about them like they’re a team.

He seems to think that over. Then he closes his book over and concedes, “Okay. Just - for a bit.”

It’s nearby, which Newt sees him mentally noting down on the short drive there. The doors are guarded, but they let you both through because they know who you both are. Here, everyone does.

Few people are inside, government staff walking along in suits or ex-recruits in civillian clothes. It’s mostly empty, like it has been every time Newt’s been inside lately, each more and more deserted than the last. It’s strange - it used to be so crowded it felt like it was literally overflowing, and now there’s nothing but empty space and old ghosts. Hermann says nothing as they walk through, not until they reach the lab.

“Oh,” is all he says, then, looking at the vacant space of it all, the room they used to fill up and clutter with themselves. Newt takes a strange enjoyment in seeing the sad look in his eyes and knowing that someone else feels that sense of displacement, too.

Hermann takes a few hesitant steps into the middle of the room and stands there, still, holding his coat over his arms. His shoulders rise and fall as he lets out a sigh. 

“Not much, is it,” Newt says, but he doesn’t mean it. He’ll never mean it. He wants to gauge the reaction and see how deeply their old life bleeds into Hermann’s new one, if it’s anywhere close to how much it does his own.

There’s a moment of quiet. Hermann walks to his old chalkboard and sets his hand on the dusty surface of it, fingers spread open. “No. Not anymore.”

Newt stares at him and wishes he weren’t disappointed. When Hermann turns back he looks away, pretends to be interested in the blue stains he clumsily left on the floor while Hermann wipes his hand off on his handkerchief. 

“It’s not the same place, Newton,” he says, quieter, but it is, _it is_.

Like he never said a thing, Newt twists his mouth up and suggests, “How about the old living quarters?” and he tries to ignore the knowledge that whatever Hermann’s testing him on, he’s failing terribly. It’s evident in the pursed lips, the concerned eyes, the fact if anybody knows how close to breaking apart his mind is, it’s him, and would be vice versa.

Their footsteps echo on the metal floors, every noise startlingly loud in the silence. There’s no way to pretend this is like old times, walking to bed after eating terrible food in the mess hall. Always together, then, and it was awful to start with until they learned to live around each other, and then, too late, learned to live with each other.

Newt’s room’s walls are still written all over in inconsistently sized letters and nonsensical structure. Hermann’s is clean as ever, nothing to prove it was his but the name on the door and the faint smell of cigarettes inside. The bedding is all gone, the hangers from the closet. Newt drops onto the springy mattress, lying back on crossed arms and says, “Claustrophobic as ever.”

Hermann sets down near his head, looking around. “You can’t miss this part of it.”

He does and he doesn’t. He misses the company, which is more his fault than anyone else’s, not that he’d admit it. He’s crammed so much stuff into his new place some of it just seems artificial, furniture there for the sake of filling a space he didn’t know what else to do with. Here, it was essentials only. Although, he really can’t say anything is better about this place than the fact that in his own he doesn’t have to shower in a communal area.

“I kinda miss pissing you off,” he admits, as close to the truth as he’s willing to voice.

Hermann leans over so he’s looking down at Newt, his mouth slightly curled at one edge. “I knew that already.”

Newt smiles despite himself.

-

Probably against his better judgement, Hermann spends the rest of the night reminiscing with Newt about lab fuck-ups, memorably stupid arguments between them, memorably incorrect spellings and solutions. He becomes animated, loud, happier than he’s felt in a while. Sometimes Hermann laughs, but he smiles the whole time and at least indulges him with this, too.

In the pauses between stories, they think of their dead, but Newt doesn’t have it in him to mention names. He really, _really_ tries not to think about them.

Hermann says after, carefully soft, “It’s not wise to live in memories,” but Newt’s too far gone, just scoffs, gets up and goes to bed instead of arguing. Nobody else gets it, not even the people who should.

-

Over lunch the next day, Hermann simply says, “There is nothing here for you, Newton,” and Newt goes tense all over.

“Don’t,” he says, lowly, and there’s an unsteadiness to the beat of his heart, a sudden nausea that takes over him when he fixes his eyes on his plate of food, “ _Don’t_ -”

“What _is_ there?” Hermann asks, half hissed. “What do you stay for? You’re making yourself sick with all these - reminders. You can’t surround yourself with these things, it’s not good for you. You’ll never move on.”

Anger flares white in his head. His hands shake with it, curled tightly around his fork and knife and he drops them, looks Hermann straight in his wide, incredulous eyes when he responds. “I don’t surround myself with them. This is my life’s work.”

“It _was_.” Hermann shakes his head and looks down at the alien blue of his arms, the dark, violent reds painted across him. “Even you’re skin is made of monsters.”

“I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want to forget them.” It’s oddly sickening to talk about because he never has. Over the years he’s focused more on studying the Kaijus than himself. It’s an old habit, one he’s never tried to fix because of this feeling, this sickness. It makes his breath shaky when he inhales. “Everybody’s forgetting. You did.”

Hermann’s head tilts back, indignant and haughty. “I didn’t. And I didn’t allow my life to become defined by that time. I don’t want to spend my whole life hoping for the world to almost end, again.”

“That’s not what this is,” Newt says, pointing a finger that can’t stay still in the air. “How can you pretend it’s not important anymore?”

“Because it’s _not_ , Newton,” Hermann says, sharply.

Newt’s chest is heaving. He feels winded. He’s leant forward, aggressively, and he backs up again, only propped upright by the back of his chair. Hermann’s expression softens and Newt hates it but he doesn’t. 

“You have to move forward.” One of his hands lifts and then stops in mid-air before it reaches the one Newt has flat on the dining table and lies over it, warmly.

This happened once, before, after the war when Hermann predicted Newt would stay in his Kaiju fixation until it started unhinging him, correctly. He offered Cambridge then for the first time and Newt said no, and Hermann left without saying anything else, and every time after he offered Newt said no out of spite and then it became out of that staunch refusal to ever leave Hong Kong, or his specimens, or the war behind.

It’s probably true that something bad is happening to Newt, an effect of obsessing with the war, something that’s crept up on him, slow and insidious, and now he has that knee-jerk reaction of denial whenever the idea of living another way is broached.

He sits for a few moments, calming his breathing and staring wide-eyed at the wall. Hermann keeps his hand all the while, and then abruptly takes it away, his chair noisily dragging across the floor as he pushes it back and moves to Newt’s side.

He leans down low to look Newt levelly in the eye and then opens his mouth with nothing to say. One of his hands lightly touches the side of Newt’s face and the other slides back over his hand.

“Sometimes arguments are better won by action,” he comments, thoughtfully, quietly, and then he leans closer and kisses Newt carefully on the corner of his mouth.

-

Newt does not take the Kaiju from the second guest bedroom with him. He cuts the brain out and sends it to his new lab, imagining someone at the post office opening it up for inspection and shitting their pants and laughing while he packages it up, away.

There’s very little he actually wants to take with him. Part of him, that loud, desperate part of him wants to take it all. But it’s time, he thinks; it’s a few years too late, maybe, but at least he got there at all. 

They fly to England, where they air tastes different and less suffocating. There’s an in-flight magazine on the back of the chair in front, and he picks it up after the first hour, boredly, flicks through the pages and stops on one with Mako’s face across one page and Raliegh’s across the other - between them it says, _**Never Forget.** ___

__Newt snorts, shakes his head in idle disbelief and then stuffs it back where it was. Beside him, Hermann makes a discontented sound in his sleep, probably because he’s still sitting up poker straight during it. Newt puts a hand on the side of his neck and guides him sideways over to rest his head on his shoulder, and he tries to get some sleep, too._ _


End file.
